B1 · Intermediate
13 min
technologymilitarygeopoliticsscience
El arma invisible: drones, Irán y la guerra moderna
The Invisible Weapon: Drones, Iran, and Modern War
Fletcher breaks down this story in English. Octavio reacts and expands in Spanish. Follow along with the live transcript, tap any word for its translation. Intermediate level — perfect for intermediate learners expanding their range.
So, buried in the news yesterday, almost easy to miss, the Kuwaiti military confirmed that Iranian drones injured several national guard personnel.
No deaths reported, but that detail, the drone detail, that's the one I can't stop thinking about.
Bueno, mira, no es una sorpresa para nadie que sigue este conflicto.
Well, look, it's no surprise to anyone following this conflict.
Irán tiene uno de los programas de drones más avanzados del mundo.
Iran has one of the most advanced drone programs in the world.
No es nuevo, llevan años desarrollando esta tecnología.
It's not new, they've been developing this technology for years.
Right, and that's what I want to dig into today.
Because when most people hear 'drone,' they think of something from a spy movie, or maybe a toy their kid got for Christmas.
They don't think of it as, honestly, one of the most destabilizing technologies of the last two decades.
Es que el problema con los drones es que son baratos.
The problem with drones is that they're cheap.
Un misil moderno puede costar un millón de dólares.
A modern missile can cost a million dollars.
Un dron iraní, como el Shahed-136, cuesta entre veinte mil y cincuenta mil dólares.
An Iranian drone like the Shahed-136 costs between twenty and fifty thousand dollars.
Es una diferencia enorme.
That's an enormous difference.
Twenty to fifty thousand dollars.
I mean, that's, that's the price of a decent used car.
And you can use it to attack a military installation or a power grid or, in this case, national guard troops in Kuwait.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Y puedes enviar cien al mismo tiempo.
And you can send a hundred at the same time.
La defensa aérea tradicional no está diseñada para ese tipo de ataque.
Traditional air defense isn't designed for that kind of attack.
Es muy difícil interceptar cien drones baratos con misiles que cuestan mucho más.
It's very hard to intercept a hundred cheap drones with missiles that cost much more.
That asymmetry, that's the whole game, isn't it.
You spend a hundred thousand dollars on drones and force your enemy to spend ten million defending against them.
The math is brutal.
A ver, Irán entendió esto muy bien hace mucho tiempo.
Iran understood this a long time ago.
Después de la guerra con Iraq en los años ochenta, Irán decidió que no podía competir con los ejércitos occidentales de manera tradicional.
After the war with Iraq in the eighties, Iran decided it couldn't compete with Western armies in a traditional way.
Necesitaban otra estrategia.
They needed a different strategy.
The Iran-Iraq war.
Eight years, something like half a million dead, and at the end of it Iran had burned through much of its conventional military hardware and was under sanctions that made replacing it basically impossible.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y después, en los años noventa, Irán vio lo que los Estados Unidos hicieron en la Primera Guerra del Golfo con misiles de precisión y tecnología avanzada.
And then in the nineties, Iran watched what the United States did in the Gulf War with precision missiles and advanced technology.
Irán pensó: nosotros no podemos hacer eso, pero podemos hacer algo diferente.
Iran thought: we can't do that, but we can do something different.
Here's what gets me, though.
There's a specific moment that really accelerated all of this, and it has an almost cinematic quality to it.
In 2011, a U.S.
RQ-170 Sentinel drone, one of the most classified surveillance aircraft in existence, went down over Iran.
And Iran captured it mostly intact.
Sí, y los iraníes lo estudiaron todo.
Yes, and the Iranians studied everything.
La electrónica, los materiales, el diseño.
The electronics, the materials, the design.
Obama pidió que lo devolvieran.
Obama asked for it back.
Los iraníes dijeron que no, claramente.
The Iranians said no, obviously.
Y después publicaron fotos de sus ingenieros con el dron, muy contentos.
And then they published photos of their engineers with the drone, looking very pleased with themselves.
Very pleased with themselves, yes.
And look, experts debate exactly how much they reverse-engineered from that thing.
But what it did, symbolically and practically, was convince Iran that they could build serious drone technology domestically.
La verdad es que el programa de drones iraní ya existía antes de ese incidente.
The truth is that Iran's drone program already existed before that incident.
Pero después de 2011, creció mucho más rápido.
But after 2011, it grew much faster.
Irán empezó a producir drones en grandes cantidades y también los compartió con sus aliados.
Iran started producing drones in large quantities and also shared them with its allies.
And that sharing, that's the part that really changes the picture globally.
Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, militias in Iraq and Syria, and then Russia, which started using Iranian Shahed drones against Ukraine in 2022.
That was a genuinely shocking development.
Bueno, cuando Rusia empezó a usar los Shahed contra Ucrania, el mundo entendió algo importante: este no es un problema regional.
When Russia started using the Shahed drones against Ukraine, the world understood something important: this is not a regional problem.
Esta tecnología está en todas partes ahora.
This technology is everywhere now.
I spent some time in Ukraine, not during this conflict but earlier, and I talked to people who tracked the drone situation closely.
And what struck me was, it wasn't the damage from individual drones that was most frightening.
It was the psychological effect.
The constant sound.
The not knowing.
Es que eso es exactamente lo que buscan.
That's exactly what they're designed for.
No siempre el objetivo es destruir algo importante.
The goal isn't always to destroy something important.
A veces el objetivo es el miedo.
Sometimes the goal is fear.
Obligar a la población a vivir con esa sensación constante de peligro.
Forcing a population to live with that constant sense of danger.
So back to Kuwait.
The drone attack on the national guard personnel, small in scale, but what is Iran actually doing there?
Is this a warning?
A test?
Something else?
Mira, Kuwait es un caso muy interesante.
Kuwait is a very interesting case.
Es un país pequeño con una relación muy complicada con Irán.
It's a small country with a complicated relationship with Iran.
Kuwait tiene bases militares americanas.
Kuwait hosts American military bases.
Para Irán, eso es un problema.
For Iran, that's a problem.
Estos ataques son una manera de decir: estamos aquí, recordadlo.
These attacks are a way of saying: we're here, remember that.
Signaling.
It's almost always signaling at this level.
The extraordinary thing is how much geopolitics happens through these small, calibrated acts of violence.
Not enough to start a full war, but enough to make a point.
Sí, y los drones son perfectos para eso.
Drones are perfect for that.
Irán puede atacar y después decir: no sabemos nada, quizás fue un grupo independiente.
Iran can attack and then say: we don't know anything, maybe it was an independent group.
Es más difícil atribuir un ataque de drones que un misil lanzado desde territorio iraní.
It's harder to attribute a drone attack than a missile launched from Iranian territory.
The plausible deniability problem.
I covered conflicts where that exact dynamic played out endlessly.
Everyone knows who did it, no one can prove it to a legal standard, and so nothing happens.
A ver, la tecnología también está cambiando eso.
Technology is changing that too.
Ahora hay sistemas que pueden analizar los fragmentos de un dron destruido y identificar exactamente de dónde vienen los componentes.
Now there are systems that can analyze fragments of a destroyed drone and identify exactly where the components came from.
Los investigadores de la ONU hicieron eso con los drones en Yemen.
UN investigators did exactly that with drones in Yemen.
Forensic drone analysis.
Which sounds like something from a novel but is apparently just a Tuesday at the UN.
And that work in Yemen, that's what officially documented the link between Iran and the Houthi drone program, piece by piece, literally.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Pero eso lleva tiempo, y mientras tanto los ataques continúan.
But that takes time, and meanwhile the attacks continue.
La verdad es que la comunidad internacional todavía no tiene una respuesta clara a esta tecnología.
The truth is the international community still doesn't have a clear answer to this technology.
So let's talk about the defense side of this.
Because NATO, the Gulf states, all of them have poured enormous resources into counter-drone systems.
And the results have been, I'd say, mixed.
Bueno, hay varios sistemas.
There are several systems.
Los israelíes tienen el Iron Dome, que también puede interceptar algunos tipos de drones.
The Israelis have Iron Dome, which can intercept some types of drones.
Los americanos tienen sistemas como el Patriot.
The Americans have systems like Patriot.
Pero el problema es el costo, como dijiste antes.
But the problem is the cost, as you said earlier.
The cost equation keeps coming back.
You intercept a fifty-thousand-dollar drone with a three-million-dollar interceptor missile.
At scale, that's not sustainable.
And Iran, or any actor using this strategy, knows that.
Por eso ahora hay mucho trabajo en tecnologías más baratas para destruir drones.
That's why there's a lot of work now on cheaper technologies to destroy drones.
Láseres, sistemas de ondas de radio que pueden interrumpir la señal del dron.
Lasers, radio wave systems that can disrupt the drone's signal.
Pero ninguna solución es perfecta todavía.
But no solution is perfect yet.
The laser systems, those are genuinely fascinating.
The U.S.
and Israel have both tested high-energy laser systems that can bring down a drone for essentially cents per shot, once you've paid for the installation.
The problem is range, weather conditions, the time it takes to acquire a target.
La verdad es que estamos en el principio de una competición tecnológica muy seria.
We're at the beginning of a very serious technological competition.
Cada nuevo sistema de defensa genera una respuesta.
Every new defense system generates a response.
Los drones son más rápidos, más pequeños, vuelan más bajo.
Drones get faster, smaller, fly lower.
Es un ciclo que no para.
It's a cycle that doesn't stop.
And what worries me, honestly, is where this ends up in twenty years.
Right now we're talking about drones that carry small explosives or do surveillance.
But autonomous weapons, drones that make their own targeting decisions, that's not science fiction anymore.
Es que eso es lo que más me preocupa también.
That's what worries me most too.
Hay drones que ya usan inteligencia artificial para identificar objetivos.
There are drones that already use artificial intelligence to identify targets.
El debate internacional sobre las armas autónomas existe, pero va muy lento.
The international debate on autonomous weapons exists, but it moves very slowly.
La tecnología va mucho más rápida que la política.
Technology moves much faster than politics.
I once asked a very senior defense official, this was maybe a decade ago, about autonomous weapons, and he said something I've never forgotten.
He said, the problem isn't building a machine that can kill.
The problem is building a machine that knows when not to.
Eso es perfecto.
That's perfect.
Mira, la guerra siempre tuvo reglas, aunque muchas veces no se respetaron.
Look, war always had rules, even if they were often broken.
Pero había una persona que tomaba la decisión de disparar.
But there was always a person making the decision to fire.
Con las armas autónomas, esa responsabilidad desaparece.
With autonomous weapons, that responsibility disappears.
¿Quién es responsable cuando una máquina mata a alguien inocente?
Who is responsible when a machine kills an innocent person?
That accountability gap.
International humanitarian law, the Geneva Conventions, all of it was built around the assumption that humans pull triggers.
The legal framework simply hasn't caught up.
A ver, hay algo más inmediato también.
There's something more immediate too.
Los drones no son solo para los ejércitos.
Drones aren't only for armies.
Grupos terroristas, grupos criminales, ya usan drones pequeños con explosivos.
Terrorist groups, criminal organizations, already use small drones with explosives.
En Iraq y Siria pasó muchas veces.
It happened many times in Iraq and Syria.
Eso es un problema de seguridad enorme para las ciudades.
That's an enormous security problem for cities.
There were ISIS drone attacks in Mosul in 2016 and 2017 that genuinely surprised Western military analysts.
Commercial drones, the kind you can buy online, modified to drop grenades.
At that point, the technology had completely escaped any kind of state control.
Bueno, y ahora volvemos a Kuwait, a los soldados heridos, al titular de ayer.
And that brings us back to Kuwait, to the injured soldiers, to yesterday's headline.
Es una historia pequeña en los periódicos.
It's a small story in the newspapers.
Pero detrás de esa historia hay treinta años de desarrollo tecnológico, geopolítica regional, y preguntas muy difíciles sobre el futuro de la guerra.
But behind that story there are thirty years of technological development, regional geopolitics, and very hard questions about the future of war.
No, you're absolutely right about that.
The small stories are sometimes the ones that contain the most.
A few injured soldiers in Kuwait, a line in a news summary, and underneath it the entire shape of how wars are being fought and who gets to fight them.
That's the story.
La verdad es que la próxima gran guerra no va a tener el aspecto de las guerras del siglo veinte.
The truth is that the next major war won't look like twentieth century wars.
No va a ser solo tanques y aviones.
It won't just be tanks and planes.
Va a ser miles de drones baratos, inteligencia artificial, y ataques que empiezan sin que nadie declare nada.
It will be thousands of cheap drones, artificial intelligence, and attacks that begin without anyone declaring anything.
En muchos aspectos, ya está pasando.
In many ways, it's already happening.